funny how
smaller than you might think, vaster than you might imagine
I’ve been using the exact same folded square of toilet paper to blot my fountain pen every time I refill it for about three or four months now. It resembles the nosebleed of some terribly well-educated, landed, gentle person. Gentle in the old sense, I am gentle in the new. My blue blooded blotter and I carouse the seaming waves, always looking out for something that can survive the dark salt water, that can breath underwater and emerge intact and stronger, softer, something that breeds new life like a manatee mistaken by desperate sailors for a comely mermaiden.
I use this pen for prose, ideas, letters, postcards: everything except writing poetry. Poetry I find can tend to purple and bruise when handled too finely. It needs plainer tools. I write it like a shopping list, unafraid of whatsoever cravings might find their way onto the page there. I know that like tormented fruit plucked over by too many hands the cliche and banal trueism will rise to the surface, overnight like cream or over many weeks like flaws on a false politician, and I can pick it over and scour it out and glean from it that which is manifest, worth its weight in oranges, weighty but not too weighty, worthy.
Throw them out of the polis.
-S Zizek.
To the lions! to the wolves! to the four winds, like caution!
Can we hang onto Clive James for a little longer. He’s working on a particularly good one but then aren’t they all.
Oh, god. Yes I am so sad about him. Yes he is. Yes they/we are, one hopes.
I met him once at a lit fest & told him I liked his poetry, “especially lately.” And then walked about smacking myself in the forehead for around half an hour. Gracious guy, but the shutters came down then – and fair enough, too!
‘Some would say that Stevie Smith was as daft as a brush’
Cue Woody Allen’s best films as ‘the early funny ones’. Nobody takes offence to being told they’re getting better :-).
I completely agree! Too many poets (?) were taught poetry as if they were taught the violin and ended up mere proficients. It begins with consciousness and language and ends in consciousness and language.
But when it happen we are all the better for it!
Like shooting fish in a barrel,
Let me count the ways etc.
What’s good for the barrel is not necessarily good for the fish.
Or vice versa.
I like this new trolling thing.
Attempting love sometimes finds love.
I couldn’t apologize for my shortcomings, but I won’t.
Nice.
I like this new trawling thing, too, even if we’s only dragnetting a barrelload of monkeys speaking fish.
Quiet in the cheap seats. If only!
Do you suppose the fish do not give a damn for the barrel and swim in circles convinced they are swimming in the straight line?
I’m not seeking disagreement at this early and funny stage of your argument. If that’s what its name is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKGeu6sg9eA
He who is craziest wins of course. #madmonk
*sings* But it would be nuthin, NUTHIN…
Fuck it! I am blaming the whole thing on my mother.
#overdeterminism
Isn’t that the definition of a Freudian slip? When you say one thing, but mean your mother.
Oh yes.
One of the best descriptions of the poetry-writing process I’ve read. Superb, Cathoel.
Thank you, Alison. I think poetry can be modest, and forthright, and pretenceless… in fact I think it has to be.